I recently received an e-mail about DVDxml.com a site for you dvdid.xml freaks.

Since the launch of Rollup 2, it is possible to enable “My DVDs” in Windows XP Media Center Edition. This feature allows you to copy, catalog and play your DVDs from your hard drive. It was also discovered by Matt Goyer that you could use a single dvdid.xml file, about 150 bytes, to have Media Center automatically download movie information and cover art. Information such as movie title, year, actors, genre, rating, length, director, description and more!

Heh. It wasn’t really ‘discovered’ by me. I was the program manager who wrote the spec in collaboration with the developers, David and Hugh. And I will say that we definitely sat around building 50 dreaming that if we created a open xml file and blogged abou tit then the community would build something like this site, we’re glad you did! We also fixed that bug with the synopsis not loading in Vista.

DVDxml.com was created so that you don’t have to make your own dvdid.xml files anymore. All you have to do is come here and download the dvdid.xml file you need. We maintain the most complete (and currently only) database of dvdid.xml files.

Good stuff!